DRM (Digital Rights Management) is a technology for managing the copyright of digital contents and also preventing the digital media contents from being illegally used. The DRM can provide a strong level of security based on an encryption technique of various kinds of media content protection techniques and also can support various business models, and thus it has been applied to various media content service areas such as music, video, e-Book and e-Learning since the early 2000s.
Meanwhile, a terminal apparatus with an operating system is being propagated rapidly, and IPHONE of APPLE INC. and ANDROID phone running GOOGLE's ANDROID operating system are the representative terminal apparatuses.
However, when supporting the DRM of audio/video media contents in the terminal apparatus with such operating system, it is not possible to apply a decoding module used in a general PC (Personal Computer) environment. Therefore, an exclusive DRM decoding module is directly built in the terminal apparatus. A typical example thereof is FAIRPLAY of APPLE INC.
The FAIRPLAY as a DRM technique made by APPLE INC. is built in QUICKTIME multimedia software and used in IPHONE, IPOD, and ITUNES. The media contents of APPLE INC. can be purchased on the ITUNES store. Since the media contents are provided in the state of being encrypted by the FAIRPLAY, they cannot be decoded in other unauthorized terminal apparatuses except IPHONE, IPOD, and ITUNES of APPLE INC.
However, in case of the exclusive DRM decoding module which is directly built in the operating system, it is difficult to change source code of a built-in media device player or add a function due to the nature of operating system. Therefore, there is a requirement for a new DRM decoding technique which can use its own function and supported codec of the media device player regardless of a version of the operating system of the terminal apparatus.